There is an episode in the final season of The Crown where Queen Elizabeth asks Prime Minister Tony Blair for advice. The Queen is down, the very notion of the monarchy in tatters after the death of Princess Diana. Blair is riding high—young, dynamic, popular. The Prime Minister sets about his task, mobilizing his message team. They beaver away and produce a folio of reforms to rejuvenate the monarchy. There are all these barnacles to be gotten rid of—the royal keeper of the Swans, the royal napkin-folder, the royal falconer, more than a hundred of them. A streamlined, populist Queen needs to be created.
Elizabeth, as is her wont, takes this very seriously. She feels she must interview the various functionaries before she can fire them. As it happens, they are gems: aesthetes of the highest order, modest, devoted—traditionalists. They treasure their tasks; they perform them brilliantly. Inkoo Kang, the decidedly austere television critic for The New Yorker notes, “It’s almost persuasive until you think about the public funds required to prop up the divine right of Kings.”
Actually, I found it very persuasive. I’m not sure that swans need to be curated or napkins folded so assiduously, or that the Royal Family requires all those castles—but the British people need the tradition of the monarchy as a repository of national identity and, despite the Windsors’ latter day family follies—or perhaps because of them, a little—Elizabeth served as an example, the definition of stiff-upper-lip propriety. They are a soap opera that binds a nation.
There are those who’ll say the monarchy is a cobwebbed vestige of an empire assembled through the most greedy, racist, brutal means imaginable—and then disassembled thoughtlessly, into “countries” with straight-line borders that did not really exist. A million people died on the straight-line that slashed Punjab in two in 1947, just so Viceroy Mountbatten could get out of Dodge (in part, apparently, because his wife was having an affair with Nehru). We are still paying the price for the arrogance of the British Empire in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. All of that is true, but incomplete somehow. The aesthetic pleasure of royal grandeur lingers.
There needs to be a centripetal force that binds people together into nations. Almost all the other forces in our fizzy, wired world tend to atomize, to shatter us into post-modern tribes, into market niches. But what holds us together? In most countries, it is ethnicity or religion…and tradition. Of these, I’d say tradition is the most benign.
In the United States, we don’t have the double-edged advantageous-disadvantage of a common ethnicity or religion. We are bound by constitutionality, a recent and comparatively weak form of coherence. We are bound by an idea that too many of us don’t really believe—that all people are created equal, and that the things we have in common are more important than those which divide us. We do have traditions, but they strain and wither against the overweening powers of commercialism and identity. We have Thanksgiving. We have the flag, but that has been appropriated by extremists who don’t really believe in the principles for which it stands. On the left, we have the First Amendment; on the right, we have the Second. But those tend to divide us more than unify.
Tradition is a conservative force, of course. It is all about the past. The left, which is all about the future, disdains it. Not even Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating a great liberation, has gathered much steam among liberals. Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, which should have been kept separate, as the two humanitarian superheroes deserve, are now mushed together and bled of meaning as Presidents Day. If Black History gets a month, as it should, surely our two greatest Presidents can each be studied and celebrated for a day.
In our relentlessly secular and unromantic society, “public funds,” as The New Yorker critic puts it, are better spent on ourselves than on celebrating a checkered past. Libertarians and economic Neo-liberals agree: Don’t waste money on statues or monuments, give it back to the people. Let them buy lottery tickets. There is something spiritually deadening when rockets to explore space are constructed by rich people, for rich people, rather than as a national effort to inspire pride and science and discovery. We, of a certain age, celebrate John Kennedy’s “We shall go to the moon” and, even more, his “Ask not what your country can do for you…” But we, as a generation, haven’t lived it. And I suspect that, in its absence, we have lost the things that matter most. As the Springsteen lyric goes, we haven’t been saving up “for the things that money can’t buy.”
Those things are not necessarily rational. They aren’t things at all, but memories and ceremonies that inspire awe, a sense of unity. In England, they may take the form of a golden coach and perfectly outfitted horse guards, slowly transiting from Westminster Abbey to the Palace. In America, it’s a tougher lift. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate the common spirit, the unity, that comes from muscular bonding—the military is the best example of this, of course, and that’s why I favor a rigorous program of national service. And other binding devices, modest ones like the American Exchange Project, which gives high school students from blue and red states a chance to spend a few weeks together. And charities like Habitat for Humanity, which Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter made holy. There are many such; each of us should adopt one. There should be sacred places as well, like the Gettysburg battlefield where a nation was saved and the slaveholders’ army turned back; the monuments to wars won and lost, World War II and Vietnam, should have a special place in our hearts. There should be a memorial to those who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, volunteers whose trust was betrayed by our leaders. The federal city of Washington should be celebrated, not demonized.
We shouldn’t just come together for the Super Bowl. We need moments of sober and humble commonality, too. We need to stand for the National Anthem, even if there are better patriotic songs; and place our hands on our hearts for the Pledge of Allegiance. If we don’t remind ourselves, with quiet passion, why we are here and just how remarkable that is, we risk losing what we have.
Another Reason to Celebrate
Speaking of humility and consequence, my old Washington Bureau Chief at Newsweek, Evan Thomas, gave this exquisite eulogy for Sandra Day O’Connor, a brilliant jurist who seemed to embody the fabric of the American West.
Apologies to those Offended
I take some care with my writing, so it was rather embarrassing that I began my most-read recent posting, The Times at Ebb Tide, with a blatant dangling modifier. Frank Bruni, who deserves annual celebration for his insights and good humor, explains the mechanics of grammar here. I tend not to worship at the grammarian shrine; sentence structure is a puzzle to be challenged and occasionally flouted. But you don’t begin an essay with a dangler. Sorry.
We do not have a blood-and-soil raison d’etre. We do not have a threatening neighbor that requires us to be unified or destroyed. What we do have is relatively short but fascinating history and a magnificent geography - and we ought to teach it. I only teach Sunday School but my forays in interaction with young people indicate that they are astoundingly ignorant of both, even in a purportedly good Westchester school system. Teaching the complexities of history was never easy but teachers are now scared to try - or not particularly interested in the first place. Partly overrun by the obsession with STEM, partly swamped by identity consciousness, we no longer tell our story in its crazy and heartbreaking glory. The void is subsequently filled by prosylatizers and con artists - and polarization ensues. A weird nostalgia drives both the left and right, a greater understanding of history can help put it in perspective.
Such a moving, perspicacious essay, as well as a courageous one, in many respects. Truly a gift to read this on Christmas Day, just a few hours after listening to King Charles’ speech.